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object:1.01 - Seeing
book class:Let Me Explain
author class:Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
subject class:Christianity
subject class:Science
class:chapter

Part One
Phenomenology



i. Seeing

The purpose of this first chapter is to illustrate Teilhard's method. Its
originality is well brought out in a long extract from the Foreword to
The Phenomenon of Man, which marks a turning-point in the history
of twentieth-century thought.



This work may be summed up as an attempt to see and to
make others see what happens to man, and what conclusions
are forced upon us, when he is placed fairly and squarely
within the framework of phenomenon and appearance.

Why should we want to see, and why in particular should
we single out man as our object?

Seeing. We might say that the whole of life lies in that
verb. That, doubtless, is why the history of the living world
can be summarized as the elaboration of ever more perfect
eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something
more to be seen. After all, do we not judge the perfection of
an animal, or the supremacy of a thinking being, by the
penetration and synthetic power of their gaze? To try to see
more and better is not a matter of whim or curiosity or self-
indulgence. To see or to perish is the very condition laid upon
everything that is an element, by reason of the mysterious
gift of existence. And this, at a higher level, is man's condi-
tion. (P.M., p. 31.)

If to see is really to become more, if vision is really fuller
being, then we should look closely at man in order to in-
crease our capacity to live.

23



Let Me Explain

But to do this we must focus our eyes correctly.

From the dawn of his existence, man has been held up as a
spectacle to himself. Indeed for tens of centuries he has looked
at nothing but himself. Yet he has only just begun to take a
scientific view of his own significance in the physical world.
There is no need to be surprised at this slow awakening. It
often happens that what stares us in the face is the most diffi-
cult to perceive. The child has to learn to separate out the
images which assail the newly-opened retina. For man to
discover man and take his full measure, a whole series of
'senses' have been necessary, whose gradual acquisition, as
we shall show, covers and punctuates the whole history of the
struggles of the mind.

A sense of spatial immensity, in greatness and smallness,
disarticulating and spacing out, within a sphere of indefinite
radius, the orbits of the objects which press round us;

A sense of depth, pushing back laboriously through end-
less series and measureless distances of time, which a sort of
gravitational force tends continually to condense for us in a
thin layer of the past;

A sense of number, discovering and grasping unflinchingly
the bewildering multitude of material or living elements
involved in the slightest transformation of the universe;

A sense of proportion, realizing as best we can the differ-
ence of physical scale which separates, both in rhythm and
dimension, the atom from the nebula, the infinitesimal from
the immense;

A sense of quality, or of novelty, enabling us to distinguish
in nature certain absolute stages of perfection and growth,
without upsetting the physical unity of the world;

A sense of movement, capable of perceiving the irresis-
tible developments hidden in extreme slowness - extreme

24



Phenomenology

agitation concealed beneath a veil of immobility - the en-
tirely new insinuating itself into the heart of the monoton-
ous repetition of the same things;

A sense, lastly, of the organic, discovering physical links
and structural unity under the superficial juxtaposition of
successions and collectivities.

Without these qualities to illuminate our vision, man will
remain indefinitely for us - whatever is done to make us see
- what he still represents to so many minds : an erratic object
in a disjointed world. Conversely, we have only to rid our
vision of the threefold illusion of smallness, plurality and
immobility, for man effortlessly to take the central position
we prophesied - the momentary summit of an anthropo-
genesis which is itself the crown of a cosmogenesis.

Man is unable to see himself entirely unrelated to man-
kind, neither is he able to see mankind unrelated to life, nor
life unrelated to the universe. (P.M., pp. 33-4.)



Such a vision will therefore be scientific in the broad sense of the word.
It will distinguish the pattern into which facts (phenomena) fall and
their succession, and, as every science does, it will look for hypotheses
that give coherence to the pattern.

Discussing scientific views as a scientist, I must and shall
stick strictly to the examination and arrangement of what is
perceptible, that is to say of 'phenomena'. Being concerned
with the links and order of succession revealed by these
phenomena, I shall not deal with their deep causality. (V.P.,
p. 217.)

[I am dealing] with man solely as a phenomenon; but . . .
also with the whole phenomenon of man (P.M., p. 29.)



25



Let Me Explain

My only aim, and my only vantage-ground in these
pages, is to try to see; that is to say, to try to develop a
homogeneous and coherent perspective of our general experi-
ence extended to man. (P.M., p. 35 .)

Pkre Teilhard begins the summary of his thought (1948) as follows:

'In its essence, the thought of Per e Teilhard de Chardin
is expressed not in a metaphysics but in a sort of pheno-
menology.'



26





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